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No, I had never heard of Karen Akers before I received a CD from DRG titled "Simply Styne." The press release lists her credits as concert and cabaret performer, and I find her voice pleasant enough, full but not exceptional. What I do like about this album, however, is that it holds nothing but songs by Jule Styne, a name that is indeed very familiar.
Here are some of the Styne classics heard on this disc: "Three coins in the fountain," "Just in time," "Let me entertain you," "I don't want to walk without you, baby," and "The party's over." Yes, this is the Styne who gave us the scores to "Gypsy," "Bells Are Ringing" and "Funny Girl."
The backup to some of the songs is a single piano and piano with an added bass to the others. The interpolation of a man's voice making comments all through a medley of Styne oldies is simply annoying. Like most cabaret singers, Akers lapses into speaking some of the lyrics. I found her liberties with the melodic line of "It's been a long, long time" disagreeable, but she handles so many of the other songs so well that I
CAV AND PAG
That popular set of operatic twins, Mascagni's "Cavalleria Rusticana" and Leoncavallo's "I Pagliacci," is out on yet another DVD, this time on the Deutsche Grammophon label. To cut to the chase, this will never be one's first choice.
The problem is that no one ever dared to tell conductor Herbert von Karajan that he had no talent for directing an opera on film. The "Cav" is all Sicilian scenery and close-ups of the singers that serve only to underscore the poor dubbing. There are choruses heard in many sequences in which no one on camera is seen singing them, people clapping in "Pag" with no sound of the applause, a table being silently overturned, and such like errors that any competent director would avoid.
At least, the conductor makes love to himself on camera only during the introductions and entr'actes and spares us his closed-eyed close-ups during the action. However, I am delighted to see that the correct character gets to speak the last line of "Pag"!
The leads in "Pag" (Jon Vickers, Raina Kabaivanska and Peter Glossop) are superior vocally and dramatically to those in "Cav" (Fiorenza
Cossotto, Gianfranco Cecchele and Giangiacomo Guelfi). One critic wrote, back when these first appeared on tape, that the viewrsr were better off just listening to the soundtrack without watching the video! Perhaps, but it is still worth having in one's collection if only as a negative example of how to put opera on film.
